Lottie and the Lamb
by Fortitudine
Summary: He's a stuffed shirt.  She's a dance hall girl.  Heyes and the Kid play Cupid for a highly unlikely pair.


**Lottie and the Lamb**

_Love sought is good, but given unsought, is better. ~ _(William Shakespeare)

It was at the gold fields up in Dakota Territory that we picked up the Lamb. He was already being fleeced by every sharp in the diggings when Heyes took it upon himself to educate him on the mysteries of draw poker. It was an expensive lesson and when it was over, Heyes said, the Lamb looked so helpless and forlorn that he just had to bring him back to our claim.

Our partner was a savvy old hard-rock miner, "Tack" Peterson. The dude introduced himself as Herbert Montgomery Satterthwaite, but Tack took one look at him and asked Heyes sarcastic-like "Where'd you get the lamb?" and the name stuck, maybe on account of he had curly hair and the biggest, softest, most innocent-looking brown eyes you'd want to find outside a pasture.

I wasn't real happy about another mouth to feed - not to mention another hand to share in our profits, which weren't all that much to begin with. But the Lamb stood six and a quarter feet in his socks and had a chest and shoulders on him like a Brooker 404, and as Heyes pointed out, this comes in handy at pick and shovel work, not to mention manning the windlass.

Tack didn't take to the Lamb at all. He said he was just too clean. Anybody who wanted to waste his time bathing and washing his clothes and cleaning his fingernails when he could have been cultivating whisky, cussing and three-card monte was a poor excuse for a man, in Tack's opinion, and had no business coming West where life was cheap and soap expensive.

I didn't mind the Lamb's bathing so much, but there was an air about him of virtue and moral uprightness that made me skittish. His character was sort of a mirror of his big, clean, healthy self and his conversation sounded so much like a Sunday school tract that after about a day and a half I wanted to kick him into the middle of the next county. Lucky I saw a sample of the Lamb's handiwork in a fracas before I tried it, because he was just as handy with his fists as a washcloth. After I watched him knock another miner out as quick and neat as you or me would flip a bug off your sleeve, I figured I'd leave well enough alone.

He had a widowed mother back in Massachusetts or somewheres and he talked about her all the time, always real devoted and respectful. We concluded she'd done a fine job raising him to be a shining light to poor lost souls like us but maybe not so good a job at teaching him how to be a human being. The local womenfolk, for instance - they shocked him through and through, and he couldn't have been more down on them if he'd been an old-maid school-ma'arm.

There were ten women at the diggings, all told, but three of those were married and didn't count because their husbands were too smart to allow them wander around loose. The others worked at the Continental, dancing with the customers and getting them to buy drinks. This was something the Lamb found absolutely scandalous. He refused to go near the place.

Heyes tried to kid him out of it. "What's so special about you that being in the same room as a dance-hall girl is going to ruin you?"

"I don't associate with crooks and tinhorns -" the Lamb said huffily.

Heyes coughed and looked innocent.

" - so why should I consort with women like that?"

"Why, you stuck up little whippersnapper!" Tack hollered. "Is that what you call manners back East? Too good to talk to some pore kid that has to make her livin' gettin' her feet trod on by a bunch of miners?"

"It's the principle of the thing!" the Lamb insisted. "I would be just as bad as those …_persons_…if I condoned them in their shameful ways."

We thought Tack was going to climb his frame which would not have been a good idea given that the old timer was about three hands and fifty pounds shy of the Lamb's weight class, so Heyes and me hustled him outside until he could cool off. But Tack wasn't done.

"You listen to me, young fella!" he yelled back at him. "I've kicked around this big ol' world for about three times as long as you have. I've learned to take people just as they come, and I'd advise you to do the same."

"As much as I value your opinion, Mister Peterson," the Lamb said with what would have been a sneer on another man, "I am afraid that we must agree to disagree on this matter."

It was a good thing old Tack didn't carry a gun or I wouldn't have given much for the Lamb's chances of staying above ground.

One raw afternoon in early March the three of us were lounging around camp when a little paint pony came cantering by, stirrups flying and one rein broken. Naturally we concluded that his rider had come to grief somewhere upstream and went to look. We were met halfway up the trail by a bundle of wet clothes that turned out to be one of the dancers from the Continental.

Her name - or at least the name she called herself by - was Charlotte Hamilton, but everyone knew her as Lottie, and she was shivering like a half-drowned kitten. We hauled her back to the tent and plunked her down by the stove where she kept apologizing for the trouble she was causing, while Tack pulled her boots off and I got her a blanket and Heyes poured her out a good stiff belt of red-eye.

She took off all the clothes she thought she could afford to, and we hung them up to dry and made her drink another whisky. Tack shook up the fire and I gave her my cleanest shirt and Heyes gave her a pair of his socks, and as cold and shaky as she was, she joked about it. She was game, that little girl.

And she sure was pretty, sitting there with that blanket wrapped around her and her feet up on a stool near the heat and her hair hanging down her back. Her face was flushed, what with her dunking and two big glasses of nose paint, and she had us laughing too, and I reckon any of us would've given his right arm for her at that moment.

Right then the Lamb walked in and I guess the sight was too much for his notions of what was proper. He looked her, and he looked at the whisky bottle, and went as stiff as a poker. We stopped laughing and Lottie quickly put her feet down.

"Miss Hamilton here has had an accident," Heyes said and there was just a bit of an edge to his voice, as if he was daring the Lamb to make something of it.

"How unfortunate. Please let me know if there is anything I can do," the Lamb stated, too politely. And then he turned and walked out.

"I'm 'most dry now." Poor Lottie looked like somebody'd slapped her. "I guess I better be going."

The life had kind of gone out of our little party and we bundled her up and took her home. When we got back to the tent the Lamb was there, quietly fixing supper. I was calculating whether I would need Heyes' help to throw him in the river when Tack turned on him.

"You consarned mealy-mouthed milk and water mamma's boy!" he snarled. "There ain't but one law out here and that's the law of hospitality which you done broke, you damned idjit! How dare you judge that gal?"

"I hope that I am Christian enough to extend a hand to anyone who needs it," the Lamb retorted. "But I will not mix with her kind."

"Her kind? What the holy howling hell do you know about her kind?" Heyes demanded. "How do you know what brought her to where she is?"

"She chose that life, she can't expect decent folk to treat her as though - "

Tack went for him and we had to hustle him outside again. By the time we got him cooled off the Lamb had taken his bedroll and a square of canvas and pitched himself a little shelter over on the other side of the camp, and it was probably just as well.

Bad weather had interrupted the stage runs for several weeks and March was sneaking up on April when word spread through the camp that one finally made it through from Deadwood with a big load of mail. Heyes and me didn't have anyone who was going to write us and all Tack's people were long gone, but the Lamb was anxious about his mother. The last time he'd heard from her she was sick, and he high-tailed it into town, hoping for a letter.

When we caught up with him he was walking back with a sheet of paper crumpled in one hand, and his face was set and white. We looked at each other and didn't know what to say.

"Mister Satterthwaite?" It was Lottie Hamilton, standing by the road with her skirts pulled up out of the mud. "Is it very bad news?"

"My mother's dead." He told her, and his voice cracked like a boy's.

She came up to him and laid her hand on his arm. "I am so sorry," she said softly.

In that moment of need she forgave him, I guess, his rudeness and his judging of her. They walked off together and we could see his shoulders shaking as she spoke to him the words of comfort which we, being men, could not think of.

After that we started to notice a change in the Lamb. For one thing, he stopped making comments about the girls at the Continental, and we even saw him talking to Lottie, pretty often in fact. Tack got worried.

"One of 'em is goin' to fall in love," he griped. "I wouldn't mind if it was him - serve him right, it would! But I'm afeard it'll be her and he'll break her heart. And then you two will just have to help me beat him up."

One day a miner said something ugly about Lottie down to the store and before Heyes or me could thump him, the Lamb spoke up. "Don't you dare talk about her like that."

The stranger said something even worse and the Lamb proceeded to tear his smokehouse down. Somewhere back of Massachusetts there was some red blood in his family, for sure. Heyes and me finally pulled him off and dragged him back to camp, snapping and growling like a lobo wolf. We told Tack what happened and the old coot grinned.

"Mebbe he's human, after all."

It was a shame that now he had finally got to where he was fit to live with, the Lamb decided to go home. He bought a ticket on the stage and packed up his kit, and we all went down to see him off. Lottie was there to say good-bye as well and she had a look to her that hit me like a kick in the teeth.

Like Tack was afraid of, she'd fallen hard. You had to admire her grit - she was dolled up in her best and her head was high, but you could see the tears behind her smile. I wanted to take her in my arms and tell her he wasn't worth it. After the coach rolled out she turned to me.

"Would you walk with me a spell, Mister Jones?" Her voice was thin and choky, and I put my hand under her elbow and steered her down the long street, past the Continental and the saloons, up the creek to where the new leaves were coming out fresh and clean.

"I made him go," she said, finally. "It's the only decent thing I ever done in my life. Did you know he asked me to marry him?"

I swung her around to face me. "Why didn't you say yes? Don't you love him?"

She closed her eyes and leaned her head against my shirtfront. "I love him so much I want to die! But how could I go with him, back to…back there, to all his family and friends? Don't you think they'd find out, sooner or later, that I wasn't his kind?"

"You're about the finest girl I ever met, Lottie. And you're anybody's kind," I whispered into her hair, but she had started crying and I knew she didn't hear me.

It was sometime after midnight that night when someone came stumbling up to the claim. Heyes picked up a shovel and I slid my Colt out of the holster while Tack lifted the tent flap and peered out into the dark.

"Who's out there? Stand up and show yerself!"

It was the Lamb, and he was a sight. He was limping and his clothes were all dirty and he'd lost his hat and his carpetbag.

"I got off the stage in Deadwood and walked back," he said simply. "I don't know how, but I'm going to get that girl to marry me."

I pulled on my boots and ran to the shack where Lottie hung her hat and pounded on the door. She was up in a minute and answered. When I told her there was a man needed her help she got dressed in a hurry and came with me. I stopped as we passed our camp.

"He's up the creek a ways," I told her. "You go along whiles I fetch Joshua and the medicine kit."

"Is he awful sick?"

"Well, he seems to think he needs you pretty bad. You better go quick." She hurried down the path, and me, Heyes and Tack decided to go over to the Continental for the rest of the night.

We got a letter from them a couple months later, just before we broke up the partnership and abandoned the claim. The Lamb had a job with the railroad and they were living in Denver - a likeable enough town - and there was a little Satterthwaite on the way.

"You know it's a shame, Thaddeus," said Tack, after he finished reading the letter. "There's a gal with pretty near ever'thing - looks, brains, and gumption - but she sure ain't lucky."

"Meaning what?" I asked.

"She could've had one of us."


End file.
